On the Tucker interview with Putin.Sometimes I wish people cared more about history but then I look at people who do care and have similar thoughts. More depth here.
I'm glad that we got to see this, because it revealed how out of touch Putin is. Tucker begins with a simple question of what the threat was on February 22. Putin's response spends *half an hour* on the entire history of Russia.
We're used to people in the Middle East talking like this. An obsession with deep history is the characteristic of cultures that fight wars that never end. No one wonder no one even in the Russian speaking part of Ukraine wants to be part of Russia. Modern people care about their own lives and freedom and want a vision of the future.
That's what Ukraine and the West offer. Not endless lectures from a grumpy uncle on how Vlad Vladimirovich sent love letters to Svetlana the Elegant in 1207 and why this proves that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.
When talking about geopolitics, the deeper someone goes in history, the more disconnected they are from modern reality, and the less likely they are to be a rational actor who can be negotiated with. Putin had arguments he could've started with about the US interfering in Russian affairs or whatever, but he's deranged enough to think that leading with a lecture on the history of the Slavic peoples is how you sell a war in the twenty first century.
And this:
It's the sort of thinking China uses to justify their conquest of Tibet, and their desire to conquer Taiwan. It's the sort of thinking the Third Reich used to justify... well, basically everything they ever did.
ReplyDelete"It's our birthright, you see - we're owed this, because of a narrative we've constructed out of nebulous details from distant history that we have convinced ourselves means something vitally important here and now."
These governments still have Feudal thinking - ordinary people are cattle to them, whose desires are so worthless as to be beneath notice; only the elites matter, and the nation is their personal property, which they entitled to by Divine Right; and anyone who stands in the way of that is a wicked and jealous pretender seeking to rob them of their due, and must by destroyed by all means.
Putin wants Ukraine because he wants to be a Tsar ruling over his own Russian Empire reborn. If he managed to take Ukraine, he'd soon turn his eyes to other former holdings - the various Turkic republics north of Afghanistan, the parts of Caucasia still outside Russian control; Finland; the Baltic states; etc. If he saw success there, he might even consider trying to wrest Outer Manchuria back from China somehow. And then, if he ever recreated the fullest extent of the Empire, why... then he'd be compelled to find new territories to add which were never part of it, on whatever convenient pretext he can dream up.
None of this should surprise anyone, by the way.
ReplyDeleteThe pursuit of "Russkiy Mir" is openly and widely espoused, and has been since the 90s.
"When people show you who they really are, believe them the first time".
Please, let’s not forget the Zionist dream alive in modern day Israel. For all these dreams of entitlement, we keep hoping that “this, too, will pass”, and then I remind myself of the Hundred Year War. People who feel deprived, and hunger for re-establishing a dream-of, mythological, Past. The Past was more nuanced than they remember. It was messier and past populations had their own dreams of a glorified, mythic Past.
ReplyDeleteZionism is an excellent example. One could also talk about Hindutva. Such ideas often have substantial citizen support in their respective countries.
ReplyDeleteNote that, in saying such I ideas have substantial citizen support, I'm NOT defending them.
ReplyDelete@David
ReplyDelete"Retweets are not endorsement", indeed.
It's always bothered me how many people on the internet seem to completely ignore context and automatically take any form of mere commentary on something as proof of support for said thing.
I suppose it's a variation on Poe's Law, and thus there's not much we can do about it, and we all just need to be attaching disclaimers to everything. But it still annoys me that we must. Alas!